


Kübler-Ross's Fifth

by kaydeefalls



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Female Protagonist, Gen, Gen Fic, Grief, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/pseuds/kaydeefalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toshiko and the Cybermen, before Canary Wharf and after Lisa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kübler-Ross's Fifth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tw_unpaired, albeit belatedly. Thanks to Quinn for looking it over. All quotes taken from TS Eliot's poem [The Hollow Men](http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/).

**zero.**   
_In death's other kingdom_

The ghosts never appeared to Tosh as anyone she knew personally. One day she was down in the archives, trying to find that Voafi energy dissimulator she _knew_ she'd catalogued just last month -- or had it been last fall? -- when she heard a strange clanking sound in the corridor. She poked her head out to see...nothing. A nothingness with a hazy form, a shadow in the air, shimmer-edged. It moved down to pass through another door, and Tosh followed it unthinkingly.

Her gun was holstered at her hip, as always, but she never even considered reaching for it.

In the next room down the shimmer-shadow dissipated, like the benevolent ghost of an archivist past, and the Voafi device was in the first cabinet she checked.

*

"I'm giving you ten minutes," Jack says, practically hissing the words through his teeth. "Then we're coming in."

Actually, he only gives Ianto five.

The Hub is a bloody mess, but there are no bodies. Owen grabs a hypodermic needle from the med bay on their way down, and Tosh prays that it's just a sedative. She clutches her gun tightly and follows Gwen and Jack.

She'll never know who killed Lisa, in the end. It could have been any of them. It could have been all of them. When Ianto turns back to look at them, face streaked with blood and tears, the echoes of gunshots ringing around them, she can't meet his eyes.

Jack glances over at Owen, who nods and steps forward to interrupt Ianto's grief with a quick jab to the neck. It turns out to be a sedative after all.

"I should have shot him in the head," Owen says coldly, catching Ianto's limp form as he crumples. "It would've been kinder."

He's not necessarily wrong.

Tosh is still holding her gun. She's been clutching it white-knuckled for goodness knows how long. When she finally lets it go, her hand aches.

  
 **one.**   
_Let me also wear such deliberate disguises_

"Do they seem more _solid_ to you, these days?" Tosh asked Jack offhandedly, as he navigated the SUV to avoid a couple of ghosts.

He frowned. "Now that you mention it...huh. That could be a thing. Is there any way you could monitor that, or something?"

"I hadn't given it much thought, but I suppose I could--"

The shimmers in the air condensed all at once, startlingly, into a searing blaze of white light. Jack slammed down on the brakes. Tosh's head snapped forward painfully.

Her comm crackled in her ear. " _Jack, Tosh, we've got a massive energy burst right in your area,_ " Suzie said, all in a rush. " _Do you know--_ "

The ghosts resolved themselves. Spots of light still danced across Tosh's vision, like sunlight glancing off metal.

"Oh, no," Jack breathed.

This couldn't be happening, Tosh thought; except that this was Torchwood, so of course it _was_.

" _It's the bloody ghosts_ ," Owen shouted, voice reverberating oddly over the comms. " _They're not ghosts. And they're attacking._ "

*

Owen deals with the bodies and Gwen deals with the logistics and Jack deals with Ianto. Everyone has their own mess to clean up. Tosh has the Cybernetic technology itself.

She doesn't want to touch it. Just being in the same room makes her skin crawl. So she fusses, procrastinates, cleans up everything around the partially-reconstructed conversion unit as though it isn't there.

It's deeply sad, the shambling detritus of a life destroyed. Lisa Hallett's formless ghost insinuates itself into every cranny of this blood-soaked mausoleum. A framed photograph of her with Ianto is trampled into the floor, the glass shattered; IV packets of morphine are lined up neatly in a mini-fridge next to bottles of water. There were books stacked along one wall, now scattered and bloodstained -- textbooks, mostly, heavy tomes on medical technology and Cybernetics. Dr. Tanizaki's hard eyes peer up at her from one dust jacket. But there are other books, too, puzzling in their irrelevancy -- penny dreadfuls, mostly, cheap pulp adventure stories, along with Gothic romances and a couple of poetry anthologies.

Then Tosh realizes -- Ianto must have been reading to her. Silly trashy fantasies to take Lisa's mind off the pain, just for a little while. Or maybe they were all for Ianto. Tosh tries to imagine what it was like for him, night after night with his Cyber-girlfriend heavily sedated or screaming with pain -- but she can't, not really. Her mind shies away from the reality of it, from the living nightmare of this horrid decaying room under the basements of Cardiff. Mr. Rochester kept his mad wife in the attic; Ianto's story is far more chilling.

She brings an empty carton downstairs and starts packing away the books, discarding the ones too damaged to be worth keeping. There's a bookmark in one of the volumes of poetry, and she flips open to that page. It's an Eliot poem, half-remembered from her uni literature courses--

 _Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost  
Violent souls, but only  
As the hollow men_

Tosh shudders, armies of Cybermen marching with ponderous clanking footsteps through the landscapes in her mind, and drops the book firmly into the carton.

  
 **two.**   
_Between the emotion and the response falls the Shadow_

Tosh was going to die.

She'd got separated from Jack in the melee. She could hear him shouting, somewhere down the street; she didn't know if Suzie and Owen were dead or alive. Suzie was in the Hub, which hopefully had gone on lockdown; she should make it through all right. Owen might have been anywhere. Tosh had lost her Bluetooth at some point, she didn't know where. It didn't matter.

She would have liked to say goodbye.

There were records of these creatures in the Archives. They'd been here before. Cybermen, they were called. She remembered Jack discussing them a time or two. She didn't remember how they'd been defeated. If she were back at the Hub, with her computers, she might have been able to determine the correct algorithm, isolate the frequency, corrupt their hard drives. Destroy these man-machines from the inside out. But she was alone on the street with only the gun in her hands and a Cyberman clanking inexorably toward her, and there was nothing she could do except scream defiance at her murderer.

Tosh was going to die, but she would not go gently into that good night. No bloody way.

"You were human once!" she shouted at the Cyberman, desperately clutching at any leverage she might still have. Her back hit a wall. She was trapped. "I read it in the files. Someone _converted_ you. Why would you want to do that to anyone else?"

The Cyberman tilted its head in a gross mockery of curiosity. "YOU ARE AFRAID," it said tonelessly. "THIS IS SUBOPTIMAL. WE WILL TAKE YOUR FEAR."

This absolutely infuriated her. "How _dare_ you? What gives you the right?"

It reached out and grabbed her by the collarbone, mechanical fingers clenching, cutting into tender skin. She cried out, the sound wrenched from her throat, feeling her clavicle fracture under the Cyberman's grasp.

"YOU NEED NOT EVER FEEL PAIN AGAIN."

Maybe that was supposed to be tempting, to people who weren't Tosh. And God knew she'd had enough pain to last her several lifetimes already. But without that, who was she?

A Cyber-thing. A robot. A non-person. Ex-Toshiko.

"Who were you?" she demanded, voice cracking. The cold breeze caught on her tearstained face, etching harsh tracks down her cheeks. "Who _are_ you?"

The Cyberman looked at her with dead, empty eyes. "I AM YOU."

Tosh spat into its expressionless face, terrified and in pain and as utterly, entirely alive as she'd ever been.

*

The next day, Ianto is gone and Tosh is afraid to ask. Owen, predictably, has no such compunctions.

"Please tell me Mr. Roboto's off the payroll," he demands upon entering, later than usual at a little past ten o'clock. They'd all had a long night, Tosh supposes.

Jack's face is stony in its stillness. "Ianto's on suspension for the next four weeks. Get used to cleaning up after yourselves for a while."

"You can't be serious, Jack!" Tosh blurts out, and doesn't recognize her own voice. Owen shoots her a glance that neatly splits the difference between approving and bemused.

"Do I look like I'm joking?" Jack asks. His tone is deceptively mild.

Tosh bites her tongue, staring sightlessly at her computer monitor. Something hot and strange thrums under the surface of her skin. She has no idea where it comes from, this sudden fury, blinding in its unexpected intensity.

Ianto betrayed them. He would have killed them all. Four weeks' suspension. It makes no _sense_.

Once upon another lifetime, Toshiko Sato sold her soul and her skills to a motley crew of high-tech terrorists in exchange for her mother's life. Or so she thought. But they turned on her in the end. Or perhaps she betrayed herself.

She remembers the thrill of sheer intellectual victory, creating a perfect sonic device out of flawed plans. She remembers the sickening, lurching horror when she saw precisely how perfectly it functioned. She remembers a colorless square cell, her own red jumpsuit like blood splashed against the indeterminate grey of the walls and floor. She remembers deserving it, every horrible second, reliving her crime over and over again in the confines of her own mind, far worse than the UNIT prison itself.

Jack believes he set her free, but a part of her is still there, always, trapped in that featureless cell, watching the blood rush thickly from her mother's nose and ears.

She thinks Jack has never understood much about appropriate punishment. But Ianto will.

  
 **three.**   
_Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone_

There was a Cyberman in the Hub.

It was dead, of course. Suzie'd killed it. There was a thrilling story involved, which Tosh only half heard as she stared into the unblinking spaces where its eyes should be.

( _YOU NEED NOT EVER FEEL PAIN AGAIN._ )

"I'm going to start the autopsy," she said abruptly, cutting Suzie off mid-sentence. "Owen, any suggestions?"

Owen pulled a face. "Yeah, for starters, call it something different. That's not human. It's not even alien. It's just a machine."

"The deconstruction, then," Tosh snapped. "Dismantling. Whatever. The part where I break it into tiny bits and try to figure out how it got here."

Jack appeared in the doorway of his office, face drawn. "I can tell you how it got here. Torchwood One. Hartman's little pet project with the ghost shifts. She dragged them right through from a parallel universe." His eyes were too bright, like sparks struck off a flint. She couldn't tell whether the strain in his voice was fury or grief. "Doesn't matter now. They're gone, all of them."

"The Cybermen, you mean?" Suzie asked.

"Torchwood One."

Voices rose around her like a tide, ebbing and flowing, demands and explanations and plans. Tosh tuned them out. She reached out and ran her fingertips along the blank frame of a Cybernetic face, the metal unnaturally slick to the touch.

( _I AM YOU_ , the empty eyes told her, accusingly.)

If she could learn how it was made, she would know how to destroy it.

And maybe then it wouldn't be partially their fault that it was here at all.

*

There is an open drawer in the morgue upon which the body of the pizza girl now lies, white sheet tucked up to her chin. Tosh never knew her name. Ianto might.

Owen did the autopsy. There were several Cybernetic chips imbedded within her crudely stitched skull along with Lisa Hallett's brain. Tosh is supposed to be studying them now, up in her lab, not still standing here beside the empty corpse of a girl who had nothing to do with any of this.

The chips themselves are tiny slivers of gleaming metal, alien and strange like everything else that washes up on Cardiff's shores. They ought to function as a sort of computer microchip, Tosh thinks, but they're somehow nothing like. She's never seen them before. Her previous Cyberman autopsy was a fully converted specimen, not this Frankenstein's monster of a girl.

Tosh still doesn't know which of them killed her. But it doesn't count, because they killed a Cyberman. A thing. Not a person.

Lisa never had the chance to be a person to them.

The girl's eyes stare blankly up at her, wide and accusing.

 _The eyes are not here, there are no eyes here_ , she thinks, and shoves the drawer shut.

  
 **four.**   
_This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms_

Tosh had never had much to do with Torchwood One. What little she'd seen of them, she hadn't particularly liked.

That fact was completely irrelevant while standing in the smoking ruins of what once had been Canary Wharf.

"'This is the way the world ends,'" Suzie murmured, and Tosh could hear the refrain echo in her mind's ear, like the tolling of a bell: _This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends._ "'Not with a bang but a whimper.'"

Owen snorted, hands at his hips. "I'd say there was a pretty big fucking bang here, actually."

But Tosh surveyed the remains -- the shards of glass and metal juxtaposed against the soot-stained once-pristine white tiles, structure still half-standing in voiceless, futile defiance -- and she thought maybe Suzie had it right. The bang had been the climax but not the finale; this was the denouement, the silence after the fall, wind whistling faintly through broken windows and down along empty corridors, the faint, distant groaning of the foundation straining to bear the load of this wreckage still too proud to collapse into the heap of rubble it was.

"Do they have a count of the survivors yet?" Tosh asked.

"Twenty-something, I think," Owen said. He pulled open what might once have been a filing cabinet. Scorched metal flaked away like dust under his hands. "Hard to believe anyone walked out of this."

Suzie shook her head. Her flyaway curls danced around her face in the phantom breeze. "No one did."

*

There is a warehouse on the outskirts of the city where the lives of Torchwood Three are laid to rest. Not the morgue in the Hub; that houses the bodies, the empty shells. But the _things_ , the _stuff_ , the messy detritus that builds up around the edges of a life -- that's what the warehouse is there for. A month or so ago, they packed Suzie away into one of those storage compartments. She liked poetry, Tosh remembers; stacks and stacks of books crammed into boxes and hidden away.

Lisa was never Cardiff's, but she has nowhere else to go.

Tosh doesn't tell Jack what she's doing. She loads the cartons of Lisa's things into the boot of her car after work one afternoon and drives out to the warehouse alone.

It's not her place, perhaps; it ought to be Ianto's. But Ianto has his own life to pack carefully away into secret compartments. Lisa is long since out of his reach. It would be cruel to confront him with her scant remains now.

There isn't enough to warrant a new storeroom. Suzie always hated to share her toys, her space; she might have been disgusted by this broken Cyberman encroaching upon her territory. But then again, it might have fascinated her. The line between life and death is very thin, an arbitrary demarcation that Suzie had deliberately trod upon. Lisa lived in the limbo of her partial conversion not unlike the artificial life of the gauntlet, and grasped it no less firmly than Suzie's hand encased in the metal glove. It's fitting, somehow.

The paperback thrillers stack comfortably with Suzie's collections of Poe and Shelley; a slim volume of Yeats slips in beside a Dickinson anthology. No one but their ghosts will ever know the difference.

One day Tosh's life will inhabit the spaces beside theirs, boxes upon boxes of tasteful trinkets and thick scientific texts, everything that made her _Toshiko_ locked away in this gaping warehouse in the darkness. For a moment, the walls close in upon her like her drawer in the morgue, rolling inexorably shut.

When she steps back outside, her eyes water at the unexpected sunlight.

  
 **five.**   
_Life is very long_

So I've offered a job to my stalker," Jack said breezily, poking his head into the Hub. "By the way, there's a dinosaur strapped to the roof of the SUV, anyone want to help me take care of that? And by anyone, I mean you, Owen."

"You've got a what on the where now?" Owen yelped, as they all made a mad dash for the garage.

Suzie rolled her eyes without missing a stride. "Jack, what have we told you about bringing pets into the Hub?"

"You expected me to resist the dinosaur?"

"I wasn't referring to the dinosaur."

"Oh, Ianto Jones." Jack shrugged expansively. "I'm pretty sure he's housebroken, at least, courtesy of Torchwood One."

"Yes, and with a delightful case of PTSD to boot, I'm sure," Suzie retorted. She shoved open the garage entrance. "And remember how we agreed he was a dose of Retcon just waiting to happen? Because we discussed that over his deeply questionable file just this morning."

Owen waved his hand. "Hello? Can we get back to the dinosaur on the jeep? Because I'm pretty sure that's the more pressing concern at the moment."

"Are pterosaurs technically dinosaurs?" Tosh wondered aloud, staring at it. It looked heavy. And prehistoric.

"Ask Ianto," Jack said. "He's got theories. Also chocolate. And he brings me the nicest things. Coffee, pterodactyls..."

"He's the embodiment of the organization that brought us such smash hits as the _Cybermen invasion_ ," Suzie snapped. "You really want to find out what else he might have carried over from London?"

"Jesus fucking Christ I think it's waking up, can I maybe get a hand over here?"

"Tosh?" Jack called over. "What do you think?"

The question caught her off guard. What was she supposed to think? Torchwood One had nearly destroyed the planet. This Ianto Jones had watched his entire world burn down around him. Suzie was right; he didn't need a job, he needed therapy. Retcon would probably be the kindest thing they could do for him right now.

But they all had their own ghosts to lay to rest, didn't they?

"Torchwood One is dead," Tosh said. "Let him in. We can all move on together."

*

Two weeks and three days into Ianto's suspension, Tosh finds herself at the door to his flat, a book tucked under one arm and a bag of Chinese takeaway on the other. She stands there for a good five minutes before she can bring herself to knock.

He looks like a ghost in torn denims and a faded black T-shirt, blinking down at her. "Tosh?"

"You were expecting anyone in particular?" she asks, keeping her tone light. She flashes him a quick smile and breezes past him into the flat. It's small and bare and colorless. The late afternoon sun paints an elongated rhomboid of light across the uncarpeted floor from one small window. It's not entirely unlike the cells in the UNIT prison.

Tosh thinks about appropriate punishments as she deposits the takeaway onto the narrow kitchen counter.

Ianto trails behind her like a shadow. "What are you doing here?"

"Leftovers from lunch today," she lies, indicating the food. "I'm so sick of Chinese, you've no idea. Thought you might be willing to take it off my hands."

He frowns, still hovering awkwardly in the tiny kitchen. His weight shifts from one foot to the other. Tosh hardly feels any less uncomfortable. They never really talked to each other, did they? He was always just...there. She looked right past him, just like the others.

"Here," she says abruptly, proffering the book. "I found this while I was -- anyway. It was yours, I think. I thought you might want it back."

Ianto takes it without really looking. "Sure. Thanks."

"How are you, Ianto?"

The question surprises her as much as him; she hadn't planned on asking. His mouth twists in bitter humor. "How do you think?"

Tosh leans back against the counter, not quite meeting his eyes. "Miserable, I'd imagine. I'm sorry. You must hate us."

"Not you," he says. "Wasn't your fault, was it?"

She wonders who he blames instead. Jack, maybe. Himself, definitely. She's been there.

"A Cyberman nearly killed me once," she says. "Back during the invasion, when Canary Wharf fell. It cornered me in a blind alley. Told me it was going to convert me. I thought I was dead."

"I'm sorry."

"Wasn't your fault, was it?" she parrots back at him. "And anyway, it didn't. I didn't die then. Neither did you, and you had a far worse time of it that day than I ever did. So. I mean. You tried to save her. You shouldn't have, but you _had_ to, and so here we are. I just wanted to say -- I understand."

He shakes his head. "You couldn't possibly."

When she closes her eyes, she can still see the blood trickling down her mother's face. "I do, Ianto."

He looks away from her, down at the book in his hands. She'd left the bookmark where she found it. He flips open to that page, to the Eliot, and winces.

"It's rather appropriate, isn't it?" Tosh says quietly. "The hollow men."

Ianto glances back to her face. "'This is the way the world ends,'" he quotes in a monotone.

Tosh's life ended the day Jack Harkness stepped into her little grey UNIT cell. She knows that well, knows that she signed her own death sentence along with the Torchwood contract. But the world -- no. The world is so much _bigger_ now, swallowing her whole. She wouldn't have it any other way.

"Perhaps," she says. "But we're still here, aren't we?"

She offers him a smile.

He takes it, returns her one of his own.

When Tosh leaves, the food still sits untouched on his kitchen counter, but she's sure he'll get to it eventually.

**Author's Note:**

> Title refers to the Kübler-Ross Model, which established the (now common) concept of five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.


End file.
